Questar Corporation of New Hope, Pennsylvania, is pleased to announce the world’s first, Maximum-Resolution Solar Spectrometer TM capable of fitting comfortably in the palm of a hand. Questar’s Maximum-Resolution Solar Spectrometer attaches easily to any telescope that, according to its manufacturer, is compatible with solar observation and that has a 1.25" drawtube. The Questar Maximum-Resolution Solar Spectrometer blocks ultraviolet and infrared radiation while allowing the sun’s visible light, the visible solar spectrum, to be viewed in true and gorgeous color.

Questar’s revolutionary, Maximum-Resolution Solar Spectrometer is the first, compact telescope accessory in the world with which amateur astronomers and science educators alike can visualize an ongoing effect of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle using a telescope of table-top size.

The accurate, highly reproducible, wavelength-measuring ability of the TM permits amateur astronomers and science educators to locate and observe the discovery line of Helium gas, the lighter-than-air element familiar to most of us from party and weather balloons and first discovered on the Sun. Questar`s Maximum-Resolution Solar Spectrometer is able to sample visible light from every region of the sun's disk, including the surrounding chromosphere, the sun's complex, transitional atmosphere, from which the helium emission arises.

Questar’s revolutionary, Maximum-Resolution Solar Spectrometer is the only, compact telescope accessory in the world capable of permitting the Zeeman Effect, our only direct, visible proof for the existence of sunspot magnetic fields, to be glimpsed in the spectra of the very largest sunspots with a small telescope of sufficient focal length, such as the Questar® 3.5". To accomplish this feat, the Questar Maximum-Resolution Solar Spectrometer resolves wavelengths of light spaced apart by as little as 0.17 Angstrom units, or 17 trillionths of a meter, and faintly absorbed by excited, iron atoms from the visible, solar spectrum. Heretofore, only professional astronomers could ever hope to catch a glimpse of this pivotal astrophysical effect.

Intimate, beautiful, greatly enlarged views of atomic and molecular lines throughout the solar spectrum at a level of breathtaking detail never before available from such an extremely compact, commercial Spectrometer are made possible by a uniquely Questar insight into the nature of image formation by high-precision optics.